Health Craze

If you planned this year to celebrate National Headache Awareness Week, you’ve already missed your chance. But don’t fret – the country’s health observances calendar is slated with more than 200 awareness days and weeks and months to satisfy even the choosiest of hypochondriacs. Be hip, be informed and be aware! In 2006, Bob explored the latest health craze.

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Comments [10]

Helen Osborne
from Natick, MA

Alas, I found this segment belittling and certainly not in keeping with your usual high standards. I founded and have led October's "Health Literacy Month" for many years. While we may not (yet) have the attention of NPR, this annual event serves as a focal point for organizations across the US and around the world to raise awareness about the need for understandable health informaiton. You can learn more at www.healthliteracymonth.org

I see now that this segment of illness awareness was originally broadcast on June 16, 2006. On Sunday's show (Nov. 15, 2009), I did not hear you say that it was a re-broadcast. That is not a good media practice. Before you go criticizing illness awareness, look at your own practices. Again, do not joke about life and death matters.

Clearly there are too many illness-awareness weeks and months. But your segment was cruel and offensive to those of us whose loved ones have died from some of these diseases. Pulmonary hypertension is no laughing matter. It is a life or death matter. I looked up the NY Times story you mentioned about hepatitis B and it appears to be old -- 2006. Is that the best you can do or was this an old interview or segment?

At the end of the tax year, the Tax Office sent an inspector to audit the books of a synagogue. While he was checking the books he turned to the Rabbi and said, "I notice you buy a lot of candles. What do you do with the candle drippings?"

"Good question," noted the Rabbi. "We save them up and send them back to the candle makers, and every now and then they send us a free box of candles."

"Oh," replied the auditor, somewhat disappointed that his unusual question had a practical answer.

But on he went, in his obnoxious way. "What about all these biscuit purchases. What do you do with the crumbs?"

"Ah, yes," replied the Rabbi, realizing that the inspector was trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. "We collect them and send them back to the manufacturers, and every now and then they send a free box of holy biscuits."

"I see," replied the auditor, thinking hard about how he could fluster the know-it-all Rabbi.

"Well, Rabbi," he went on, "what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?"

"Here, too, we do not waste," answered the Rabbi. "What we do is save up all the foreskins and send them to the Tax Office, and about once a year they send us a complete dick."

Normally I am a huge fan of OTM. Maybe that is why I am writing. I found this commentary interesting, but the ending was disappointing. You ended with a bit on Genital Integrity Week, then closed with a comment about the lack of media coverage of this awareness week with a joke about it being the "cruelest cut of all." For those of us who do view our own circumcisions—a procedure performed on us without our consent that has permanently multilated our genitalia and stolen something from us that was our right—such a cheap joke at our expense is offensive. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, the woman whose book "Prisoners of Ritual" brought the horrors of female circumcision to the attention of the Western world put it best: "Viewed quantitatively, the extent of genital tissue destruction in the overwhelming majority of ritually mutilated women far exceeds the physical damage found in male circumcision. On a qualitative level, however, we are dealing with one and the same thing."

HiThis spot was great! The only thing is that you got Lupus Awareness Month incorrect. In 2008 it was changed from October to May to align with World Lupus Day which is 5/10. You can find out more at the Lupus Foundation of America website: www.lupus.org. BTW, The IL legislature has declared Lupus Awareness Month to be May in IL.Love the show.. Diane